Once
by pebblysand-jacksam4eva
Summary: It happened once a long time ago. They were kids and it didn't matter. (Strong T)


**Disclaimer:** Not mine, don't sue.

**Warning: **Strong T, I guess. There's sex but I'm incapable of writing proper smut, so...

.

* * *

**.**

**Once. **

.

Once.

A long time ago.

They were kids.

Water, bridges and all that.

Once, between the walls of an apartment that threatened to collapse under the weight of textbooks worth more than his car. Today, she's asked about him and she's too smart to deny it - tension mocks every attempt they've made at burying the remaining _something_ that they have - and the past allows her to hide the way she trampled her marriage vows under the soles of her three-inch heels. Sometimes, he wonders if people believe her when she hints that attraction can resist the years, that the place they stand today can be justified by the lines they've crossed as kids.

He was there that one time and he doesn't believe her.

.

The sun sets, warm, windows open; he hangs up the phone as Alicia comes in, bags of Chinese takeaway pulling at her palms. Sunday, April 11th. 3L. She's wearing this short, flowery dress she never wears to college – she's not that kind of girl – and Will watches as her foot shuts the front door – the hem rides up and he catches a glimpse of the white skin of her upper thighs.

His brain's dull but his words are detached when they come out, natural. He's not feeling anything, really. Yet. "Still going out tonight?"

She looks startled. "You're not?"

"Might stay in with a movie, whatever you want,"

Her face looks somewhat relieved, she smiles and nods as she gathers food containers out of the plastic bags. He's been trying to get her to go out more lately, especially since the bloody, break-up fight she's had with Peter two months ago, maybe in hopes of cheering her up, make her forget him, get her tipsy, in his bed (no, that's a thought, not a plan. He'd never, not with her).

She's not the type, anyway. And even though he did see her with that one guy at Erik's party three weeks ago, he was – sadly – too busy lying to Kyra O'Brien about how good she is at mock trial to see how far it went.

And he'd never dare to ask.

Alicia brings food that he doesn't touch and beers that he downs but she's too engrossed in the movie to notice. The less he tries to think about the phone call, the less he thinks about anything at all, brain empties and connections die, suffocate with a rope tied around their neck. Alicia would understand; she's been there before – almost. It's just one of those things that are meant to happen, sooner or later, predictability at its finest. Yet, the words are stuck inside his throat and it's terrifying, haunting; if he doesn't tell anyone, will he wake up tomorrow morning to the sound of Aubrey swallowing her tears, telling him it was a _motherfucking joke_?

He doesn't move when the movie ends, sits on the floor beside the couch. Her legs stir behind him. "Will?"

"Huh?"

"Nothing, thought you fell asleep,"

She yawns, swigs her feet on the ground.

"Can't."

The reason why alcohol helps his insomnia is that it relieves stress and makes him feel reckless. He forgets how so very young and so very old they all feel; thousands of dollars into debt, they attend parties where people still play beer pong and flip cups in dirty basements. Twenty-five and all his friends are working on Wall Street and he's stuck. Law school is this book he cannot _wait _to finish but the world is just itching to dig holes in his shoulders, patiently, and maybe this exhaustive, passive, three-year limbo is quite a comfortable prison to be in. When he can't sleep, Alicia pretends she doesn't mind the repetitive sound of his baseball hitting the wall beside the window.

"Something's wrong?" She asks.

It doesn't make sense. He keeps replaying the conversations he's had over the past eight months, what he said and what his mother said and why? Maybe he should have been there. Should have gone home this summer when they told him about the bankruptcy and the house and – How will he be able to take care of things tomorrow if he can't even tell the person he lives with?

"No."

"I'm going to bed, then. Need to be up early tomorrow,"

He smiles at her quiet, tired voice and at the dark circles that carve the edges of her eyes – _one day we'll both get our names on the door and we'll be able to wake up at whatever time fucking suits us._ He picks up a ball from the floor.

"What time?" He asks.

"I don't even want to think about it,"

A weak smile crosses her features.

"'Night, then."

She falls asleep and he still hasn't told her. Maybe that's it.

.

Around two – maybe three – Alicia wakes up, pads to the kitchen, gets a glass of water. She walks back, passes him. "Still here?"

"Yeah,"

Her glass is empty on the counter, she sits on the floor in front of him. Something's changed in her eyes: sleepiness, worry, Will doesn't know what it is but it's definitely there.

"Can you hand in Revenue for me tomorrow, I need to go home for a few days?"

"What's going on, Will?"

He eyes the kitchen and what is left of Chinese in the trash. It's funny how somebody else is dead and yet hole dug with burning iron is in_ his _stomach, someone is pulling at _his _insides and all _he_ wants to do is to scream. Death is not something you think about, it's something you cry about.

Silence fills the cracks in his mouth and her gaze doesn't leave his face as one word comes out of her mouth: "Who?"

Rapid, sharp breaths kill everything he wants to say; maybe nothing's real, he's hallucinating from the lack of oxygen. Alicia moves next to him, hand on his shoulder, "I'm sorry,"

It's not what she says or whether she means it but it's her voice, it's soothing. All he hears above it are Aubrey's sobs and strangled words, the hook in the garage and the letter on the kitchen table.

Depression's bullshit. His hand hugs the baseball and shoots Alicia's glass down from the faraway counter, she flinches when it scatters on the floor. Anger. Anger is the poison that stabs his throat "My sister's nineteen years old. She's nineteen years old and she comes home from work and she finds a chair upside-down on the floor and her own father hanging from a rope in the basement."

Alicia's hand covers her mouth as he begins to explain the business debts and the mortgage on the house and the fights about law school, yet she doesn't say anything. All he can think about is how did happen so quickly and how come he didn't see it coming, how come he didn't prevent it? He was too fucking busy with his own shit and school and Alicia –

"It's not your fault, Will," she stops him. "No, listen to me. It. Is. Not. _Your_. Fault."

The curse of suicides is that twenty years later, he still kind of thinks it was. That night, she falls asleep on his lap but at six in the morning, he still hasn't blinked.

.

Thirty minutes later, he feels like shit for waking her up but she'd kill him if he didn't. Her muscles stretch against his skin; she yawns as she looks up. He knows he's cried last night after she fell asleep and judging by the look on face, it shows. Should he be trying to hide it? He wishes he were one of those fictional people, the ones who don't feel the pain in their eyes and the salt in their mouths and need someone else to wipe the tears off their cheeks.

"Will,"

"I'm fine."

Her breath whispers past her teeth as she bites her lip. "I need a shower,"

Something he appreciates in her is her comforting disgust for platitudes, how little she tries to tell him _why_ and _it'll be alright,_ because if he doesn't know, she doesn't know and no one will ever know.

"Thanks,"

It's all he tells Alicia before she leaves the room and all she does is to smile back. She smiles because there's no guidebook, nothing to tell him what to say or feel when your father is dead and your best friend or former best friend or the girl you were – are? - so fucking in love with until she started drifting apart from you after she met her new – now ex – boyfriend stays with you all night and you begin to believe again that she actually does _care_.

In hindsight, he wishes he could remember every detail of that night and that morning, the way her hair looked and fell against her back when she got up and made it to the bathroom. He wishes he could remember what exactly led to it, this once-a-long-time-ago-when-they-were-kids that conditioned everything they do up to what she tells Laura today, this old one-time fling that was supposed to drown when they both chose to throw it over the bridge. Remember why he followed her and decided to stand against the doorframe to her room until she came out, closing the bathroom door behind her. The last time he'd seen his father, they'd had a fight, he'd stormed out of the house and made it back to D.C. two days early. He never told him – anything really.

.

Alicia stands against the opposite wall with a pale blue towel wrapped around her body, hair wet and unmoving; in retrospect, he thinks she knew. Knew what was about to happen and wondering if she should fight it.

.

He takes a step towards her and it's enough for them to be close – too close – with the fresh smell of her shampoo floating in his head. "Will," she whispers, sighs but when his lips crash against hers, that one morning, it all makes sense. Her mouth is raw, she kisses back, grabbing his shirt and pulling him closer. His fingers grip the back of her neck; she feels so good – so, _so_ good – and she's beautiful, smart and witty and she's just the kind of girl his Dad would have wanted him to marry.

.

Water dripped on his skin and dried against hers; attraction is the reason why he couldn't stop by then and why he steals kisses from her lips today, in his office after failed cases and pointless fights. A moan escapes her mouth, she pretends she's stealing clients and she can just _decide,_ but the things she's smart enough not to tell him are what, he thinks, has kept them afloat all of this time.

.

"Will," Alicia says again when his mouth finds her neck, "are you –"

Sure this is a good idea? Sure he's not just trying to forget? His tongue is in her mouth and forbids her to speak. He doesn't want to think. Alicia slows down and he presses her stronger against the wall, daylight shines through the windows of her bedroom and his knee finds the space between her thighs; she bites his lower lip to suppress a moan. "Okay," she finally says when his hands are on her hips and she leads the two of them away from the wall until the backs of his calves hit her covers. "Let's do this right."

She's got cream sheets and a large bed. He sits on the edge, her legs touching his. Fingertips follow the curves of her body as he watches her slide the towel down her thighs and his mouth slightly opens when she climbs – naked – on his lap. She's more confidant than he'd thought she would be – and God he's imagined this _countless_ times – but maybe it's just been too long, too much waiting, too much indecision, too much pretending it didn't exist.

They don't talk. It seems to be rule number one. He doesn't tell her how beautiful she is and she never tells him to stop, never tells him he's making a mistake, that she still dreams of Peter most of the nights she closes her eyes. They're not kids anymore, they're half-kids, one foot in and one foot out, trying not to trip on the wire they'll have to walk on for the rest of their lives. He can't compete. Can't compete with Peter, can't compete with her life, and probably doesn't even want to. He just never wants to forget this. His lips on hers and his fingers between her thighs, her mouth everywhere on his skin, the way she holds onto his back like she's never going to let go. There's something about the sounds that she makes; her quiet ragged breaths when she comes … when he hears them again twenty years later, it reminds him of how Alicia Cavanaugh always makes a point of vanishing out of his life. It's like they're everything but what they really are.

Later, she falls asleep and he studies her body, memorizes the shadows the curtains draw on her skin, all her beauty spots, as if he already knows this is _once_, the one, the excuse.

He kisses her and she skips her class.

"I don't want to wake up," he says.

It's eight-thirty, maybe nine. Can't see any reason why they shouldn't just stay here forever, forget how they got here, forget why what they did changes everything and nothing_._ Finals are in three weeks and he knows, deep down, that no matter how much they'll promise each other not to drift apart, they will. This, friendships like these, they don't grow old.

"I'm sorry about your father, Will,"

He holds her hand in his and squeezes tighter, wonders how much of a clever judgment call that was and what kind of person feels the need to have sex after their parents die. "You need to go home –"

"I love you,"

Yeah, he doesn't really like to think about it because it's that _once,_ too. The one time he's said it to her face as her fingers drew patterns on the skin of his chest and she sighed, unfiltered, honest, "we've got bad timing, Will."

.

They have sex again before he really needs to go, but that time it's different, he's biting on something bitter at the back of his mouth, as if he already knows that when he'll be at home burying what's left of his father, Peter will call her and apologize, tell her it doesn't matter if she doesn't follow him to Chicago for another six months. She'll never tell him about that _once._

(But it might not have mattered anyways, Will thinks, because Peter loved her so much by then, and she loved him back).

.

Twenty years later Alicia calls and hangs up and Laura runs away and it has stop. What he wants is to try, properly this time, because once isn't once, hasn't ever been once but will only be once and once and once again if he doesn't fight, doesn't kiss her more, doesn't call her back and doesn't tell her that second times, second stories, second loves are they grew up to be.

The phone rests in his hand and he decides second chances are opportunities you should never drop.

.

* * *

.

So this was my personal response to Alicia constantly trying to justify her relationship with Will by a one-time thing in college. I tried to incorporate it into the current canon of the show (OMG, so, so much is happening!) and end it on a somewhat more hopeful note, so I hope you liked it. This story is both a result of me trying to play with a different college Willicia backstory than the one I consider to be my head-canon (which is more Cannonballs-like, I guess) and maybe stirring into a somewhat AU direction with Will's father, I don't know. Anyway, I can't even begin to describe how terrified I was of publishing this for some reason. Please, if you feel like it, don't hesitate to review. If you don't, it was still very nice to have you around.


End file.
